Short-circuit Logic
rusi
rustompmody at gmail.com
Thu May 30 12:58:44 EDT 2013
On May 30, 5:58 pm, Chris Angelico <ros... at gmail.com> wrote:
> The alternative would be an infinite number of iterations, which is far far worse.
There was one heavyweight among programming teachers -- E.W. Dijkstra
-- who had some rather extreme views on this.
He taught that when writing a loop of the form
i = 0
while i < n:
some code
i += 1
one should write the loop test as i != n rather than i < n, precisely
because if i got erroneously initialized to some value greater than n,
(and thereby broke the loop invariant), it would loop infinitely
rather than stop with a wrong result.
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